There’s a simple yet powerful technique I just discover for lower your Cost/Conv. (how much $ it costs you to generate one sale), and thereby giving your ROI a big post.
On just one of my campaigns that I tested out this method in I took my Cost/Conv. for $10 to $5!!! 
And I did it without sacrificing a SINGLE SALE.
It’s all profit!
Here’s the prerequisite, you need a campaign, a large campaign with a lot of adgroups, that been running for at least 6 months. So you should have 6 months of Cost/Conv. data to work with.
I have campaigns with 100s of adgroups so it wasn’t a problem for me.
Now normally when optimizing such a campaign you focus on adgroups that are making sales, and just pause adgroups that generate a lot of traffic with no sales. However, you’ll also have a ton of smaller adgroups that generate very little traffic.
So what do you do with these low traffic adgroups?
Well if you were like me you just let them run, after all you don’t want to make a rash decision. You want statistically relevant data to work with.
Here’s what happened, after 6 months of letting a lot of my campaigns run on autopilot, I noticed a lot of them still had tons of adgroups with very little traffic and no sales.
Then it hit me, if I added up the total cost of all these tiny adgroups it comes to $1000 with no sales to show.
You know what I did? I paused every single one. If these adgroups didn’t make a SINGLE SALE, combined, in 6 months, if I paused them they were only going to help my bottom line.
And you know what, that’s EXACTLY what happened.
Simple yet effective
Amit, I would love to do this too!
I’ve just gotten started with IM, and have a successful adwords campaign so far, but have had trouble tracking sales.
For instance, I use google analytics to analyze my traffic and to check on my ad performance, and I check clickbank (my product provider) to see how many hops/sales I’m getting, but I have no way to connect the two, which is obviously a problem. (no way to see which ads or keywords made the sales)
Any recommendations?
Amit, do you have more than 1 adwords account? Also have you ever had to ask Google to increase your keyword limit (I’m quite certain you probably did) and how did that go?
Thank you.
Hey man your site isn’t displaying correctly in firefox, your entire post is a link to cafepress. Please fix it.
The key is always look of your campaigns as the Key is ROI many people Fuss of CTR etc.. but ultimately it boils down to ROI and if you aren’t making money stop doing it. and spend that money to something else.
How do you track keyword conversion? I mean, how do you know if a particular keyword converted into a sale or a lead?
Hello Amit,
First up I just wanted to say I read your blog regularly and think the advice you’ve posted here is excellent. I also watched your video from Affiliate Summit and thought the presentation was packed with great info. Nice work!
I’ve got a question related to the above blog post which I’d really appreciate your help with.
I use keyword analytics and can see which keywords are making the sales. Like many affiliates, I have hundreds of keywords in my campaigns. The obvious thing to do is to delete keywords that don’t make sales. And keep the ones that do. Easy! But here’s my problem.
I still find it hard to make decisions about keywords that get a low number of clicks. I have an army of keywords that aren’t making sales but that combined add up to a lot of clicks / costs.
I’m still stumped on this. I don’t like deleting keywords that could get a sale on the next click. But, at the same time, they are losing me money.
Many thanks,
Tom
Isn’t this fairly obvious? if it doesn’t convert, delete it.